Old and New Tensions in Gender Research: Understanding Fundamental Expectations of Female Negotiators

Although much progress has been made, women still face conflict at work. With the heightened awareness of the challenges women face in the workplace, old challenges are resurfacing and new challenges are being introduced that can be better understood through research. This symposium adopts different approaches to explaining why women still obtain worse outcomes at work and in negotiation, relative to men. The first two presentations describe new forms of discriminatory treatment faced by women. The third presentation calls into question prior findings on backlash against female negotiators. The fourth presentation describes a gender difference in understanding charm that negatively impacts women's relative outcomes at the bargaining table. Through the presentation and discussion of four papers, we hope to 1) introduce new explanations for the lack of gender parity in workplace outcomes and to facilitate the reconciliation of these different approaches by finding unifying themes among them.